With Issue No. 21, GR has provided 1,343 new reviews and 99 reprinted reviews (the latter brings online reviews
previously available only viz print or first published in now-defunct online
sites). With this issue, we also increased our coverage of poetry publishers by 20 to
498 publishers in 17 countries. This is important as I feel that much of
the ground-breaking poetry work is being published by independent and/or relatively
small presses who (by the nature of their work) are not always as well-known as
they deserve.

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your
projects for potential review—note that because we believe in Poetry's
immortality, GR does not limit reviews to just "recent" poetry
publications. And, obviously, people are following up with your review copies (see below)!
Information for submissions and available review copies HERE. Future reviewers
also should note that the next review submission deadline is MAY 11, 2014.

Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from
review copies sent to GR:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews

Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews

Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews

Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews

Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews

Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews

Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews

Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews

Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews

Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews

Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews

Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews

Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews

Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews

Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews

Issue 16: 49 out of 73 new reviews

Issue 17: 73 out of 108 new reviews

Issue 18: 84 out of 104 new reviews

Issue 19: 41 out of 68 new reviews

Issue 20: 50 out of 64 new reviews

Issue 21: 46 out of 78 new reviews

*****

The beauty of Blogger is how typos can be corrected at any point
in time. If you see any typos, feel free
to let me know as I can still correct them even after the issue's release.

*****

GR is also delighted to be the first publisher for one of our contributors, Brooke Kressel who engages with poems by Wislawa Szymborska and Sandy McIntosh

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge’s new collection, Hello,
the Roses, takes its reader on a spiritual journey, a record of
investigation into the imaginative and intuitive connection between her speaker
and the world around her. The long,
discursive lines for which the poet is well-known move meditatively outward
from the inner locus of longing for connection through a series engagements
sited within the “home” places of the poet: New York City, northern New Mexico,
Maine. A collection of “essays” or tries in the original sense, these poems
record a journey toward beauty and spiritual connection as a process of
healing. We “open to accident,” she assures us, “intimacy can be the bridge.”

Intimate
with what? Berssenbrugge reaches out to the peopling creatures, plants, and
weather of her home places, the first poem titled “Animal Voices.” In lines often
reaching beyond the width of the page, the poet chronicles a sustained
attention, often visual in nature, though at times instigated by touch or smell
or sound. These attentions call into question how it is we live in the world, how
we attend or don’t attend to our intimate neighbors, and hypothesize possible
means to breaching the silences between in a language driven by the potencies
of dreams/dreaming, yet also often borrowing the lexicon of science.

I begin by imagining I hear
thoughts.There’s a sense of
pervasiveness; particles go back and forth in me.I write down today’s
encounters, including the mosquito, as a dream to interpret.Certainly, one’s tie to an
insect is imaginative truth.Not that my horse represents the union of intuition and
imagining, she is that.Turning her head to smell
the wind, she shifts into wind’s seamless dimension—mane, tail. (4)….A horse does not change
frequency to change form.

In this poem, Berssenbrugge
uses “form” as “intent” (4), the poet’s, which

bridges the gap between self
and other, whereby“discontinuity
becomes continuity” (5): a sense of the moment “deepening” or increasing in
intimate connection. In the effortless way the horse becomes a form of wind,
the concentrated attention of Berssenbrugge’s speaker allows her to be drawn
out of herself, by “filaments of light like whispers” (9) into another
presence: “within the illusion of my body, an emergence place” (11). Yet this
is no “dialectic of self-other…. // Mists and petal together form their own
pathway, precepts threading back and forth as if through live wires in air.”
(29) A new compound reality forms, not two separate experiences, but a shared valence
of experience.

Hello, the Roses offers an evolving awareness of how connections
between self and her place-others manifest, operate, change, a record of
movement from a state of alienation/isolation to communion: “I myself may be
part of an emergence, dizzy, unaware I’ve crossed a threshold into new focus.”
(25) Meditations on the nature of feeling/memory/being, the lines of these
poems are laid down like accretions of understanding across the boundary of
inner and outer, self and world: “wind, heartbeat, object falling into water,
perception merges with the surface.” (39) Her attention caught by the material
manifestations of the world “emplaces” her in the world, making her present
against the background noise of illness – “my plans are still a sick
person’s.” (23)

The
attention of which Berrsenbrugge writes and the resulting sense of communion
suggests the Buddhist notion of satori,
the experience of shifting from isolated experience to immersive oneness:
“Looking at the plant releases my boundaries” (51) – “My seeing becomes so
slow, it seems to disengage; it grows cloudy; then suddenly meaning as a whole interweaves
with my perception.” This sensibility is strongest in the second section of the
book where the green world is Berssenbrugge’s focus. “Forest is the originatory
fullness of presence.” (44)

I see her multiple aspects
as living representations, her symbiosis with birds, relation to originatory
plants, fragrance as medicine administered by an oracle.These aspects are not
referred to, not associative, but intrinsic to my sight, as slowly gaps
diminish and missing images appear or experience fills in; one transforms to
another along an extended multi-dimensional axis of seeing the plant.It’s not a metaphor for the
flow of our surroundings. (52)

The “flow” the speaker’s
consciousness and the flow of the organism’s biological processes are imagined
as sharing a single wavelength or motion: the speaker enters the flow of being,
at least imaginatively. The poems read as records of awareness brought to deep
stillness, as the speaker’s body moves in attentive deliberateness through an
environment, through sustained perception/response: “My seeing becomes so
transparent and natural, a vista of awareness into which consciousness forms.” (42)

Formally,
Berssenbrugge’s poems resemble Wittgenstein’s linguistic clarifications in Remarks on Colour, both in their formal
arrangement and analytical attention. Wittgenstein develops his claims as a
series of points presented in short discrete statements. Similarly, each line or stanza in Berssenbrugge’s poems encodes a
discrete stage of unfolding awareness/insight in a spiritual journey, composed
as stages of a mystical argument. Though the foci are quite different for Wittgenstein
and Berssenbrugge, there is a correspondence in the formal arrangement and
progress of text on the page.

In
the final section of this collection, the speaker’s illness moves to the
forefront: the speaker “writing in empty space between pain symptoms.” (65) In
attending to the visual field around her, Berssenbrugge’s speaker experiences
not only a sense of communion or oneness, there is also relief, spiritual if
not also physical. And where language had at times previously verged into the
fabular (“clairvoyance,” “fairy realm”, “touch dimensionality”], in this final
section Berssenbrugge becomes more concrete and explicit: “I may confuse
longing with response from a plant, creativity I mentioned as air in the
riverbed I know to be blue and loose as a bundle of petals in summer, when
disease didn’t exist.” The speaker’s burden of physical suffering weights the
transcendence described in the middle section of the book, the motive force for
the speaker’s outward reaching: “I render physical pain into emotion.” (67) In
the poem “The Lit Cloud,” the writing of poetry and its tropes manifest as the
process underlying the unpacking of perception and awareness.

I come to a rock by water to
watch the sun set.Sun lights a gray cloud
above me with so many rooms and convexities.When I look up, it’s a scrim
of lighting effects.There’s no volume to the
object.I watch sunset in late
summer, trying to quiet myself, to open my heart desiring relatedness; it comes
as metaphors of weather,To work with a metaphor, it’s
first visualized, then energized to this gray transparency expression in a
shaman. (69)

Driven by suffering, the
language of the poem maps a process of revelation and self-nurture. In sending ourselves
outward into “an open circuit” in which “Our reflections are part of the play
of sunlight and reflections,” Berssenbrugge argues we will find relief both
physical and spiritual: “My being becomes fused and transformative, like a
river in rain.” (71) A record of seeking, a book of spells to release grief/suffering,
Hello, the Roses, is an offering to
the reader of the “the immortal, a wave in the environment,” (87) “cosmic time
coming forth as beautiful pattern.” (88) An exploration of the possibilities of
communion and healing experienced as love via focused attention upon the human/other-than-human
nexus, these poems point us out of
ourselves, even and perhaps most vitally at the most intense experiences of
embodiment, illness, disease. Berssenbrugge reminds us that we must reach
outward into the world and find ourselves in intimate connection, in “streaming
exchange” (84): an insight to liberate us from the tyranny, not only of pain or
suffering, but also of deadlines, over-commitment, and the quotidian busy-ness
in which we so often immerse ourselves. “Sacred means saturated with being.”
(92)

*****

Marthe Reed is the author of four books: Pleth, a
collaboration with j hastain (Unlikely Books 2013), (em)bodied bliss
(Moria Books 2013),Gaze (Black Radish Books 2010) and Tender
Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink 2007). A fifth book of poems will
be published by Lavender Ink (2014). She has also published four chapbooks as
part of the Dusie Kollektiv; a fifth is published by above / ground press. An
essay on Claudia Rankine’s The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx
Travelogue appears in American Letters and Commentary. With
Nicole Mauro she publishes Black Radish Books.